pink timber room rises over munich bike racks as urban lab ‘zuhaus’

architect clemens hoyer designed the structure as a real-world urban laboratory for shared street space.

kat barandy June 22, 2026 5 min

a room above the bike racks

In Munich, a small timber structure now rises above the bicycle racks outside a residential building, its pale pink frame lifting a room-sized volume into a pocket of street space usually given over to passing traffic.

Called ZuHaus, the temporary structure by architect Clemens Hoyer turns a familiar edge of the road into a place that can be booked, occupied, furnished, and tested by the people who live around it.

The project will stand from May 29th to July 31st, 2026, as a real-world urban laboratory, or Reallabor, asking what can happen when a parking bay is treated as shared neighborhood infrastructure. Instead of treating the street as leftover space, Hoyer gives it a small architectural body, open enough to invite use and specific enough to make the question visible.

The team asks: ‘Can a parking space support work, music, play, learning, or conversation?‘ In Haidhausen, the idea is being tested at full scale.

zuhaus munich clemence hoyer — images © Jens Bluhm

clemens hoyer tests park space as shared architecture

Built on stilts above existing bicycle stands, ZuHaus keeps the ground plane largely intact while adding a new layer of use above it. The gesture is simple, almost literal: where the city already stores mobility, architect Clemens Hoyer fits a room.

Its timber construction gives the installation the recognizability of a tiny house, while its exposed position keeps it tied to the rhythm of the street, with pedestrians, cyclists, residents, and passersby moving around it through the day.

The structure is designed as a flexible shell, with its interior shaped through participation over time. Furniture workshops bring residents into the making of the room, while round-table talks open questions around housing, density, and public space.

Other formats test how the room behaves under real conditions, from informal gathering to focused work. Through surveys and conversations, the project gathers responses to spatial qualities, programs, and atmospheres that could help such places gain long-term acceptance in dense neighborhoods.

a doctoral project becomes a street experiment

Munich’s ZuHaus forms part of Clemence Hoyer’s doctoral research, titled ‘From Generic to Specific Space. The Densification Potential of Parking Space in Dense Urban Neighborhoods Using the Example of the Franzosenviertel in Haidhausen, Munich, at TU Darmstadt’s Department of Design and Building Construction under Prof. Felix Waechter.’

The research begins with a direct urban pressure: in compact cities, housing is scarce, open land is limited, and existing streets still hold areas assigned to stationary vehicles for much of the day.

The project proposes a shift in how those areas might be read. If some activities move out of private apartments and into shared neighborhood rooms, domestic space could be rearranged from within, with a home office making way for a child’s room or a small apartment gaining access to functions it cannot contain alone.

Visitors can book time slots through the project website, check the program, and take part in a four-minute survey about their experience, turning use itself into part of the research.

the street as a room under negotiation

Supported by the City of Munich’s Department of Urban Planning and Building Regulation, District Committee 5 Au-Haidhausen, HRW Vollwandsysteme, KliuKork Sprühkork, and WH-Schilderdienst, ZuHaus sits between architecture, urban planning, and public art.

Its scale is modest, but the question it raises is larger than the structure itself. In a city where every square meter carries value, Hoyer’s room above the bike racks gives a visible form to a debate usually held through policy, diagrams, and plans.

By placing the experiment in the middle of Haidhausen, the project turns a familiar street condition into something people can enter and assess with their own bodies. Its success will come less from a finished image than from how residents use it, argue with it, ignore it, or return to it.

For design, that makes ZuHaus an especially useful kind of prototype: one that treats public space as something shaped through occupation, and housing as a question that can begin just outside the front door.